Abstract
In this ethnography of the USA’s legal responses to human trafficking, anthropologist Alicia Peters asks two central questions. What has led to trafficking’s construction as an issue predominantly about sex? And how does this excessive focus on sex affect victims of trafficking? Peters develops a constructive critique around these questions, drawing upon two and a half years of ethnographic research in New York City and Washington, DC with those tasked with assisting trafficked persons in the USA, and with trafficked persons themselves.
In brief, the book makes the following arguments. Cultural norms shaping public perception of one form of trafficking – forced commercial sex – influence the drafting, interpretation, and implementation of the law against human trafficking in the USA. The law – and the ideas shaping it – in turn impacts trafficked persons’ access to benefits and services. Peters argues that the US anti-trafficking law delivers uneven outcomes for survivors depending on the nature of work into which they were trafficked. Those trafficked into forced sexual labor receive easier access to benefits and protections than victims of other forms of labor trafficking.
Peters situates this exploration of the relationship between the “law on the books” and the “law in action” in the interdisciplinary field of law and society. Part 1 of the book offers a close, critical reading of the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000, demonstrating how prevalent concerns about sexuality influenced its drafting. Peters argues that the TVPA “symbolically privileges” sex trafficking, owing to a strong lobby of anti-prostitution “abolitionist” activists who aligned with conservative Christian groups during the Bush administration towards a shared agenda to abolish the sex trade. While feminist scholars have long questioned the way these combined lobbies conflate sex work and sex trafficking, the author demonstrates exactly how they have impacted the law. Peters argues that though the TVPA ostensibly protects victims of all forms of forced labor, it marked sex trafficking as a special category of “severe” forms of trafficking to create the bipartisan momentum to pass the law (p. 66).
Peters’ conceptual and methodological use of the category “law in their minds” is interesting and effective. In Part 2, the author highlights the complex interpretive frameworks through which those implementing the TVPA perceive trafficking. Peters’ interviews with two different categories of professionals – social service providers on the one hand, and law enforcement and criminal justice on the other – reveal contrasting approaches because of their professional biases. Law enforcement agents prioritize assisting victims of sex trafficking because they see sex trafficking as more easily identifiable and prosecutable than other forms of trafficking. On the other hand, the NGO service providers Peters interviewed are committed to assisting all victims of trafficking, regardless of the type of work they were trafficked into. The roots of these professional biases could, however, have been explained further.
Chapter Four shifts gears to the life histories of survivors of trafficking. Drawing upon detailed interviews with them, Peters challenges the prevalent presumption that sexual harm is the most severe form of suffering. The women’s narratives illustrate the complexities of trafficking by highlighting aspects of exploitation such as isolation, deceit, and threats to their families.
Part 3 brings together these various strands of analysis to foreground the highly uneven implementation of the TVPA. Peters demonstrates how the law’s definitional confusion combines with tensions between those implementing it to the detriment of many victims of trafficking, who are not counted as victims, unable to seek justice, or experience long delays in receiving protections and benefits.
The book reflects the strengths of Peters’ research methods, analysis, and commitment to applied anthropology. The author is respectful of the opinions of all interlocutors, even when she disagrees with them, as she explains the limitations imposed by their professional and ideological frameworks. She also provides considerable detail about her methodological choices across an impressive array of sites and informants. Peters brings together the perspectives of those who implement the law and those they are tasked with assisting, to “present a multidimensional account of the TVPA’s spotty and tendentious implementation” (p. 4). By situating the book at these intersections, Peters breaks new ground within critiques of anti-trafficking policies. Commendably, the book goes beyond analysis to provide two specific policy recommendations to help the law serve survivors of trafficking better: eliminating the conceptual bias towards sex trafficking in the TVPA, and placing survivor experiences at the forefront of policy formulation and law enforcement training.
The few shortcomings of the book are as follows. For one, it primarily analyzes interviews and case histories, lacking the texture of a fine-grained ethnography. This reviewer is well aware of the challenges of doing participant observation in the field of anti-trafficking intervention – long-drawn out cases, hurdles in gaining access to victims, the multiple agencies involved, and so on. Therefore, some explanation of why Peters chose to focus on interviews rather than a thick description of the “law in action” would have been useful. Second, though accessibly written in a manner legible both to academics and wider audiences, the book is also rather repetitive.
Nonetheless, this excellent book contributes both methodologically and conceptually to studies of law and society, gender and sexuality, and human rights, as well as critical anti-trafficking studies. It will be a worthwhile read for students, scholars, activists, and practitioners interested in trafficking, migration, labor, human rights, and the impact of legal policies.